Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (9 page)

By the time I started planning the HIV survey, that special status had been eroded by the cacophony of free speech unleashed by the democratic reforms. The cabaret shows continued, but most waria made a living by working in a salon by day and/or selling sex on the streets after dark. So every night, I would go out with a team of interviewers, including three off-duty waria, and cruise the pavements, inviting people to participate in our survey. On the streets, waria specialize in blowing kisses and flashing body-parts, in shrieking and teasing prospective clients who cruise slowly past in cars or on motorbikes. They teased me, too, these biological men who wanted to be women, perhaps offended by my lack of femininity. Why couldn’t I walk in high heels? Why didn’t I ever have a decent manicure? ‘Here, allow me . . .’ and they whip nail varnish out of their clutch bags, and I’d be sitting on a pavement after midnight having my nails painted by a transgender sex worker. The evenings were punctuated by high drama; one night, shortly before local elections when the mayor wanted to show how tough he was on immoral behaviour, there was a sweeping of sex workers and half the research team got arrested. There were cat-fights between waria who wanted to be in charge of study recruitment in their area, study staff ran off with clients mid-interview, and I once came close to losing all the blood samples we had collected because the cops at a road block saw used syringes, pegged me for a drug dealer and tried to confiscate all my kit.

They were busy nights, usually ending up with a delivery to the lab at 3 or 4 a.m. By eight in the morning I was back on my motorbike and on my way to the daytime part of my job. On the way, I was often accosted by a teenager in white robes and a chequered turban, a member of the Laskar Jihad fundamentalist group which was at the time openly waging war on Christians in the eastern islands of Maluku. He rattled his collection box and distributed pamphlets promising a Maluku cleansed of Christians. This was a lot more shocking than the blossoming of gay bars or bookshops offering socialism and multiple orgasms. Though it was easy to make fun of the vague assertions of Pancasila, I took it for granted that religious tolerance was central to Indonesia’s continued existence. And yet in the jockeying for power that had been going on since the fall of Suharto, Indonesians killed one another in the name of religion, and the authorities did nothing.

After Gus Dur was impeached, Sukarno’s daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri took over as president. She shared her father’s strong belief in national unity, but not his charisma; she had the well-upholstered look common to
Ibu-Ibu
in the Suharto era, and was famously aloof. Though hers was a colourless presidency, she didn’t needle the army in the same way as her predecessor had. Prodded into action by a bomb in a Bali nightclub that killed over 200 people in 2002, she began to take more serious action against Islamic extremism. The country gradually settled down.

In 2004 Indonesia held its first direct presidential election; until then, presidents had been chosen by the legislature. In over half a million polling stations nationwide, voters stuck a nail through a ballot paper to indicate their choice. One of the polling stations was directly outside my house in central Jakarta. From dawn when the volunteers, officials and ballot boxes arrived until the final tally in the early evening, the air was electric with excitement. The poll was as well organized as anything I’ve ever seen in Indonesia, and it made me rather emotional. Five years earlier, Jakarta was in flames and the economy was pulverized. Since then Indonesians had been traumatized by the loss of East Timor and the army-sponsored carnage that followed, they had watched civil war unfold in Maluku and witnessed bloody rebellions in Aceh and Papua, they had impeached and replaced a president, and they were still materially a lot worse off than they had been before 1997. But 140 million voters went peacefully off to the polls on a single day and, with barely an incident, elected a new president. It was quite an achievement.

Given a choice for the first time ever, Indonesians chose a Suharto-era general uniformly known as SBY, representing a party that had only existed for four years.

I left Jakarta for the second time a year later. When I came back in 2011 to begin the wanderings that make up most of this book, SBY had been re-elected for a second term. In my absence Jakarta had completed its transition from a collection of scruffy but friendly neighbourhoods into a grandiose-but-grumpy megalopolis. In the few remaining alleyways, the noodle men still ting-ting, the vegetable vendors still chant their wares. But they must compete with neon-lit Indomaret convenience stores and the just-add-water Indomie noodles of the New Indonesia. Indonesia is being homogenized by the same force that pulled these islands together into a map of a nation, drawn by the Dutch and appropriated by the Indonesians: commerce. Since SBY has been in power, the economy has grown by 5.7 per cent a year on average. That’s close to five times more than the UK and nearly four times the US rate over the same period; it left Indonesians three times richer than they had been when I first lived in the country. The new wealth has created an army of new consumers armed with cell phones and satellite TV; it may have done more to blend Indonesia together than all of Suharto’s flag-waving ceremonies and cookie-cutter bureaucracy.

I bought a massive map of Indonesia, folded it into my backpack together with the schedule for the national passenger ferries, left the cacophony and comforts of Jakarta behind, and set out to get to know my Bad Boyfriend better. ‘You’ll find an Indomaret on every corner,’ teased my friend Gouri as I set off for Sumba, the little-known south-eastern island where I had taken tea with dead Granny all those years ago. ‘You’ll be bored to tears and come back in no time!’

*
In urban areas a district is replaced by a city, and a village by a neighbourhood. The Indonesian terms are Nasional, Propinsi, Kabupaten/Kota, Kecamatan, Desa/Kelurahan.

*
Quoted in Brian A. Hoey, ‘Nationalism in Indonesia: Building imagined and intentional communities through transmigration’,
Ethnology
42, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 112.

Map A: S
UMBA
I
SLAND
, Nusa Tenggara Province (NTT)

3

Sticky Culture

I had been in Sumba less than ten minutes when a young man thrust a cell phone at me. On the screen was a photo of a corpse lying in the marketplace. This one was definitely not receiving guests for tea. ‘Look, there’s his hand over there.’ The young man zoomed in to give me a clearer view of the body part, hacked off in a frenzied machete attack in broad daylight just a couple of weeks earlier. ‘It happens all the time.’ He introduced himself as Fajar, a Javanese doctor posted here as part of a government programme that obliges newly qualified medics to serve in well-paid short-term posts in extremely remote areas.
*
‘Sumba’s not like Java,’ he said.

Sumba sits at about four o‘clock in the squashed oval clockface of Indonesia, not far to the north of Australia. There are no steeply terraced rice fields, no volcanoes, no shadow-puppets or tiered temples. For a couple of hundred years, Sumba interested the outside world because it was covered in sandalwood. Once that had been clear-felled and sold, it turned into a landscape of rolling grassland, toasted brown for much of the year by the pitiless southern sun. In the dry season it’s vaguely reminiscent of the Meseta Central in Spain, not least because it is good horse country and jousting is a favourite sport. It’s not uncommon to see, silhouetted against the evening sky, a man on a stocky pony holding a lance, for all the world like Don Quixote.

Arriving in today’s Sumba from today’s Jakarta, you feel like you have travelled through time as well as space. In Sumba a ‘high-rise’ is a two-storey building, and they exist only in the island’s two largest towns. The landscape is dotted with megalithic tombs; they are scattered along the roadside, they sit in front of modern bungalows, they fringe the marketplaces. Most, even brand-new ones, are made of vast stone slabs arranged in a square and topped, mushroom-like, with an even vaster capstone dragged up from quarries by the sea. But there’s now a modern version of the tombs, too, of cement covered with tile, that make Sumba look like it’s oversupplied with public loos. There are none of Jakarta’s business suits in Sumba; here a well-dressed man has always worn a head-tie and a large swathe of home-woven cloth wrapped around his waist and legs. The cloth (and many a commonplace pair of trousers too) is belted with a sling from which hangs a machete, a long, straight blade curling into a hooked handle of wood or buffalo horn, sheathed in a wooden scabbard. When I arrived at Tambolaka airport in the north-west of the island, the first thing I saw was a banner reading ‘STOP VIOLENCE!’ – the
Ghostbusters
-like stop sign drawn through a brace of machetes. Beneath it stood a large group of men with weapons hanging from their belts.

I had laughed at this. It was then that Fajar, who was sitting next to me in the share-taxi that would take us to the region’s main town of Waikabubak, whipped out his cell phone and showed me the severed hand. ‘Violence is just part of life here.’

He was not the first to make this observation. The one lonely administrator sent to establish a Dutch foothold on Sumba in the 1870s reported back to his bosses in the colonial capital of Batavia that ‘there is no other rule than that of the strongest’. Headhunting and slave raids, he said, had ‘reduced the value of a human life to a very low level, often well below that of a horse’. The Dutch didn’t consolidate their hold on Sumba until 1913, after a bloody two-year fight against the famous headhunter Wono Kaka. He had provoked the Dutch by decapitating soldiers and hanging their scalps with those of his other enemies on his clan’s skull tree.

After the Dutch soldiers came Protestant missionaries. In the crowded islands of Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi, most Indonesians are Muslim. But out here in these eastern villages, I didn’t see a single jilbab. The people of Sumba are nominally Christian, though on previous visits I had found that many still cleaved to the ancient Marapu religion, guided more by what they read in the entrails of a chicken than by what they read in the Bible.

I had chosen Sumba as my first stop after Jakarta in part because I remembered it from my first visit in 1991 as a forgotten corner of the country, bypassed by the changes of the Suharto era, about as far from Jakarta as one could get, even then. Now I was curious to see whether places like Sumba had changed at all or whether the gap with the increasingly brash Indonesia symbolized by Jakarta was simply growing. At first glance, Sumba was more modern now. People of all ages gossiped on cell phones in the marketplace, there were satellite dishes even on the grass roofs of traditional bamboo houses, and people who would until recently have walked everywhere were buzzing about on shiny new motorbikes. Would any of the arcane traditions that I had stumbled upon on previous visits have survived?

Twenty years after taking tea with a dead grandmother, I dumped my bags in a dispiriting hotel room, asked the staff to sweep away the dead cockroaches and set out to explore. Though Waikabubak is the biggest city in West Sumba, you can walk it end to end in about twenty minutes. The most imposing building in town is a church with a vaulted entrance that smacks of a miniature Sydney Opera House. There’s a hospital that looks as though it dates from the 1930s, especially on the inside. Apart from that, Waikabubak is mostly boxy breeze-block shop-houses and small bungalows. I wandered along the main street, looking for a pair of shoes; Jakarta’s vast marbled malls had overwhelmed me and I’d fled without buying any sensible footwear. The street was lined on both sides with small family-owned shops that could sell you virtually anything, so long as it was in one of 500 shades of grey. An enthusiastic contractor had dug up most of the high street and ripped out all of its pavements several months earlier, then ran out of money. Now, every passing minibus sent clouds of dust flying into the open-fronted shops to settle on bins of rice, stacks of plastic chairs, beach balls, coconut graters, sarongs, batteries, onions, soy sauce, salt crackers, dried fish, engine parts, sheet roofing, flip-flops, toothpaste, batteries, fishing lines, home-baked buns, kreteks, motorbike tyres and the myriad other things that villagers visiting this, the big city, might need. The owners of these Aladdin’s Caves, ethnic Chinese to a man – and, frequently, to a woman – had an astonishing ability to poke a hand into a landslide of grey
stuff
, and bring it out clutching whatever the buyer asked for. Even during power cuts when the shades of grey thicken into a soupy dusk, the shopkeeper could put a hand into the pile and extract a flick knife, a length of ribbon, a notebook. I bought a pair of grey shoes. The first time they got rained on, they turned out to be green.